Here & There: Seeing New Ground

June 2 - July 11, 2009

An exhibition for LAND/ART

516 ARTS announces Here & There: Seeing New Ground, our first exhibition for LAND/ART, opening Friday, June 5, 5-8pm. LAND/ART is a large-scale collboration organized by 516 ARTS, exploring land-based and environmental art, involving over 25 organizations during 6 months in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Mountainair. Here & There: Seeing New Ground features contemporary artists examining the landscape from perspectives that are both visual and cultural, including explorations of Native American film, as well as Native and non-Native artists who subvert landscape perspective to examine issues of the environment and human beings’ relationship with nature. Through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, print, film and installation, these artists offer interpretations of the land and landscape both within and without human interaction. The exhibition is curated by 516 ARTS with experimental film artist Marcella Ernest and Nancy Marie Mithlo, Assistant Professor of Art History and American Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The exhibition catalog features an essay by Nancy Marie Mithlo inspired by the film Intrepid Shadows by Alfred Clah (1966), on view throughout the exhibition.

EXHIBITION PROGRAMS

Opening reception: Friday, June 5, 5-8pm

Live music DJ Mitchell Wilcox The main reception is at 516 ARTS, plus check out the concurrent reception for COLOSSUS, a site project in the Gold Street Lofts, 104 Gold Street SW, Downtown Albuquerque.

Please join us for a reception for Laurie Anderson at 516 ARTS on June 10 immediately following her solo concert at the KiMo Theatre. Her film Hidden Inside Mountains is featured at 516 ARTS as part of Here & There: Seeing New Ground, and it will be screened on the immersive planetarium dome on Thursday, June 11 at 7pm, where she will give a talk on art and science, followed by a demonstration of the dome technology. Hidden Inside Mountains, about nature, artifice and dreams, is a high definition film that debuted in Japan at WORLD EXPO 2005 on the largest high definition Astrovision screen in the world. Located in a fictitious world of theatrical spaces, this film of short stories unfolds through music, gesture, text passages and the poetry of juxtaposed, evocative visual images. Anderson says, “I was inspired by the present tense and directness of haiku. In this film I tried to use telegraphic language to describe the scale and sensuality of nature.” Laurie Anderson in Albuquerque is presented in partnership with AMP Concerts and UNM ARTS Lab. For ticket information, contact the KiMo Theatre Box Office (505-768-3544), Ticketmaster (505-883-7800) or ampconcerts.org.

516 ARTS and the UNM M.F.A. in Creative Writing program present a reading in the gallery celebrating Native poets in conjunction with the exhibition Here & There: Seeing New Ground. The program features George Ann Gregory, Orlando White and Nora Yazzie, and focuses on indigenous voices, celebrating the sacred relationship between language and the surrounding natural environment. The event features poetry anchored in the perspective of the original inhabitants of this land, and includes contemporary works written in the English language and traditional poems sung and recited in the indigenous languages of the tribes. This event is part of the LAND/ART Symposium Weekend. Download flyer

OFF-SITE INSTALLATIONS

COLOSSUS is a site project in conjunction with Here & There: Seeing New Ground. A collaborative, site- specific art installation in the Gold Street Lofts in Downtown Albuquerque, COLOSSUS was created by artist Karl Hofmann and the students of Bret Aaker at Amy Biehl High School. The piece is a large-scale interpretation of the mountain Grosser Mythen in the Swiss Alps, a famous subject for Romantic artists and writers for centuries, revisioned out of scrap wood, cardboard and junk mail. The project uses waste-stream materials to explore contemporary and historical ideas of the Sublime as a source of inspiration. A soundscape by students of Blake Minnerly at the Media Arts Collaborative High School accompanies the piece. This project is part of an effort to showcase temporary art installations in empty commercial real estate spaces in Downtown Albuquerque.

Australian artist Timothy Horn’s Medusa is a 9-foot wide chandelier-like structure, made of transparent silicone rubber. Medusa is based on engraved images of jellyfish by 19th-century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who created drawings of microscopic lifeforms and marine creatures. Haeckel’s attempts at rendering these ephemeral organisms were flavored by his imagination, at a time when technology didn’t allow for them to be recorded more accurately. Timothy Horn has been intrigued with the invented rules and role of subjectivity in Haeckel’s scientific study of the natural world. Horn’s 800-pound Medusa is temporarily installed in Santa Fe in conjunction with Here & There: Seeing New Ground for LAND/ART, and Horn’s work is also included in the exhibition at 516 ARTS.